The S stands for?

My tongue-in-cheek post a while back on Web Fundamentalism generated lots of interesting traffic and pointers. At some point I must internalize and summarize it all, but for now I just read (some of) it. The best thing I've seen so far is Peter Lacey's The S stands for Simple, a hilarious and very relevant Socratic dialog.

One reader responds:

It’s funny, really. The modern approach to design for just about everything starts out by taking an old thing that actually does what’s needed, whining like a baby that it’s complicated, then stripping it down to the barest minimum requried to make it simple and make it work.

That would be fine, but it always turns out that the bits getting stripped out were complicated but useful, and thus need to be “evolved” back in, with care taken to ensure that no-one ever learns from the lessons of the first attempt because that would mean admitting that the simplification phase didn’t actually work right.

A story we have seen repeated so many times we lose count. But in this context, is he/she talking about SOAP/WS as a response to CORBA, or REST as a response to SOAP/WS? Or both? To what extent are SOAP/WS complex because the world is complex vs. inherent flaws in their design?

One more interesting perspective, this from what one might call the pragmatist (or is it pessimist?) school: Want to be cool? Learn REST. What a career? Learn WS.